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Sicko (2007)
Thoughtful, funny, moving cinematic essay
Like many others, I hesitate to call Moore's films "documentaries"; Oscar win notwithstanding, it's become less trouble to remove them from that (ostensibly) "objective" label altogether and consider them to be what Orson Welles called his great 1975 effort F For Fake: essay films. Looking at the Moore filmography through that prism at least helps this writer free himself of the (at least subconscious) guilt for admiring the films in spite of their refusal to bow to the documentary traditionnot only in failing to present opposing viewpoints, but also for their loose, freewheeling structures (particularly in Bowling for Columbine) that some dismiss as rambling and disorganized.
So dismiss the ideology if you'd like, or tear into the minor points of contention, but make no mistakeSicko is a tremendous film, possibly Moore's best, equal parts devastating fact, hilarious social satire, and genuinely moving emotion. Moore acknowledges (following a brief prologue) that the film is not about the 50 million Americans who are completely uninsured, but the 250 million who think they're covered, and their battles within our broken system. The film's first act is the story of a few of those Americans, and while Moore's reliance on anecdotal evidence may not be the greatest journalism, it certainly makes for good dramaand better film-making that a laundry list of statistics.
The second act takes us on a tour of foreign countries and their government-run health care systemsalong with some helpful rebukes (though again, primarily anecdotal) of the usual (and usually right-wing) arguments against "socialized medicine." In a strange way, however, Sicko becomes about more than health care; Moore discovers other advantages of living in England or France, and wonders why America can't boast of the same.
I'm sure that some more narrow-minded critics will seize on these passages as proof of Moore's anti-Americanism, but I think it's just the oppositehe loves our country, but knows it isn't perfect. Here, it seems, are some ways in which it could be better. What could be more patriotic than that? I will say that I wish the advance hoopla over Moore's trip to Cuba hadn't leaked out, as the film is structured in such a way that it would have been a nice surprise. That being said (and concerns about the validity of that footage aside), it leads to some amazing footage of (at long last) care for people who genuinely deserve it, and a quite scene at a Cuban firehouse that moved me in a way that no other 9/11 commentary has.
At the end of the day, Sicko is simply an extraordinary filmfunny and powerful and moving and scary (it gets under your skin in the same way Bowling did). It provokes thought, not just about the health care system, but about our country as a whole, and what we want from it. Oh, and it's got one of the best closing shots in recent memory.
Even Money (2006)
"Even Money" busts out
"Even Money" is an ensemble drama that aims to be the Traffic or Syriana of gambling, but comes off closer to Crasha trite amalgam of scenes we've seen many, many times before. The fact that you've heard so little about a film with such an impressive cast (Kim Basinger, Ray Liotta, Danny DeVito, Tim Roth, Kelsey Grammar, Nick Cannon, Jay Mohr, Carla Gugino, Forest Whitaker) should tell you something; indeed, the scuttlebutt on the ol' World Wide Internets is that the film was headed straight to DVD until Whitaker picked up the Oscar.
The cast is mostly good, but there's only so much that they can do with this material. Basinger and Liotta are especially hard up, stranded in a story thread that is older than the hills; poor Carla Gugino is stuck playing the same scene (by my count) three times straight, which is a criminal misuse of an actress as intelligent and sexy as she. Tim Roth has some nice moments as an especially snarky bad guy, though this viewer wondered if he would really show up at the college basketball game that provides the film's climax (with a resolution that can be clearly seen the moment the story turn is introduced). Kelsey Grammar (nearly unrecognizable) appears, at the film's beginning, to be doing an interesting piece of character acting as a cop, but he then disappears for over an hour, which makes his character's big final scene somewhat less than compelling.
"Even Money" is a mess, an attempt to manufacture a prestige picture by throwing many talented actors at a script whose most complex insight appears to be "gambling is bad". We should expect as much from producer Bob Yari, who gave us the aforementioned "Crash" ("racism is bad"). Director Mark Rydell has helmed a couple of successful films ("On Golden Pond", "The Cowboys") and some interesting failures ("Intersection", "The Rose"), but when he pops up briefly as a powerful figure at the end of "Even Money", all I could think of was his similar acting role in Altman's "The Long Goodbye", and how much I'd rather be watching that movie than this one.
Home of the Brave (2006)
Horrifyingly incompetent butchering of an important topic
Poor Tommy Yates (Brian Presley), one of the heroes of the Iraq war drama Home of the Brave, has fallen so far after his return home that the best job he can get is (shudder) working the box office at a movie theatre. He runs into Vanessa (Jessica Biel), who was hurt in the attack that killed his best friend, at the movie theatre; they chat about how hard it has been to adjust. Tommy notes that he sells "stupid tickets to these stupid movies," but he never goes to see them, because they "seem so unimportant."
There are no other scenes at Tommy's place of employmenthe could work at any number of low-paying menial jobs. But screenwriter Mark Friedman works in that little piece of commentary to congratulate both himself and the viewer; the film you're watching is not like all those other "stupid movies," you see. It's important. The problem is that Home of the Brave is an execrable film, so poorly made and obvious that it is impossible to take seriously, no matter how earnest and noble the intentions. A bad film is a bad film, whether it concerns serious topics or not.
Most bad films can be blamed squarely on the scriptand this one's a doozybut Home of the Brave is incompetent on every level: bad writing, bad directing, bad music, bad editing, and mostly bad performances. Director Irwin Winkler started out as an accomplished producer, and bore that credit on many good films (Raging Bull and Rocky among them), but he has yet to direct a good film, after many tries (The Net, At First Sight, De-Lovely, Life as a House). There's no focus to this effort; the pacing plods, the performances are all over the place, and there's not a cliché in the war movie book that Winkler doesn't embrace (when Chad Michael Murray buys the farm early in the pictureto my immense reliefWinkler actually has his best buddy Presley run to him in slow motion, screaming "NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!").
The screenplay, by first-time screenwriter (and former Harvey Weinstein assistant) Mark Friedman, is astonishingly bad. Its poor quality sneaks up on you, since there's minimal dialogue before the first extended action sequence (though said dialogue does include the news that this Iraq company will be heading home inside of a week, which anyone who has ever seen a cop movie knows is a sure sign of impending death and destruction). But the dialogue is atrocious, the kind of corny, cliché-ridden platitudes that would get a quick rewrite on your average made-for-TV movie (which Home of the Brave, with its plinky piano music and slo-mo flashbacks, often recalls). For example, when he visits his buddy's widow (Christina Ricci, whose tiny role in a film this bad is entirely inexplicable), she asks, "Was he a hero, Tommy?" He replies, "He died defending his country." The whole script is like that.
And everyone gets a big monologue. Poor Jessica Biel actually has one where she tells the story of how she was injuredwhich we saw, in its entirety, in the opening sequence. Her telling adds no insight or additional perspective to the earlier scene; I guess it's there for people who showed up late (helpfully, footage from the scene is shown over her shoulder, as if she's Katie Couric or something). Victoria Rowell, as Samuel L. Jackson's wife, has a long monologue where she lists all of the things she did for their family while he was gone; he's aware of all of them ("I supported you when you enlisted!"), so this entire speech exists purely for our benefit. And so on. Even Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson gets a monologue, and whoa boy was that a bad idea. I know he's a tough guy (since he'll never shut up about how many times he's been shot), so I'm sure he can take the criticism he'll receive for his performance in this film. He's awful, all dead eyes and mumbled dialogue; given moments that require a real actor (like when he accidentally takes out an Iraqi civilian), Jackson's face registers nothing. Whatever you call him, Jackson or Fiddy, he stinks.
Brian Presley, who probably has more screen time than anyone, doesn't fare much better. The bulk of Presley's resume, according to IMDb, is on soap operas; this is his first major film, and with any luck, it will be his last. His line readings are stilted and unconvincing, his attempts at genuine emotion are laughable, and even a good actor would have trouble delivering his final "Dear Mom and Dad" voice-over well.
Samuel L. Jackson is good enough, I guess, but when is he going to get back to making good films? We've given him like ten years of paycheck roles now; it's time for him to stop phoning it in. He basically has to play the same notes that his contemporary Denzel Washington did in Courage Under Fire ten years ago; that was a brilliant, subtle performance, but even more so compared with Jackson's work here (his drunk act is about as nuanced as Foster Brooks'). The surprise of the film is Jessica Biel, who is actually the best thing in it, proving that her solid (but brief) turn in The Illusionist was no fluke. She has a couple of moments so honest, in fact, that they deserve to have been airlifted into a better film.
Believe it or not, I feel like I'm low-balling the sheer ineptitude of Home of the Brave; it really is inexcusably stupid, a mixture of every bad Lifetime drama, filtered through a hot topic to make it seem timely. And that's perhaps what is most reprehensible about the film: it is a ham-fisted, simple-minded, schlocky examination of an important subject. And for that, the people who made it should be ashamed of themselves.
Blood Diamond (2006)
Another film with potential shafted by lazy writing
The first indication that something went very wrong at the screenplay stage in Edward Zwick's new film Blood Diamond occurs around the twenty minute mark, when Leonard DiCaprio's character is asked, "How long have I known, you, Danny?" Attention, anyone with even a vague interest in film: this is poor screen writing. There is no quicker, more dependable indication of a lazy, sub-par writer than this little ditty, which appears in an astonishing number of very bad scripts. It is a writer saying, in essence, "I cannot be bothered to think of a way to impart this information in natural, conversational dialog, so I will simply have one character ask another character something that no human being would ever say to another, because I have total contempt for my audience." Because, really, why would any person ever ask another person how long they'd known each other? Don't they both know? The screenplay is again the downfall of a film with potential in Blood Diamond. It is not quite as bad a script as the one that Emilio Estevez slapped together for Bobby, but it's a photo finish. Estevez' scenario was full of one-dimensional characters and bland, clunky exposition, but there was a little bit of color and voice to at least some of it; Blood Diamond plays like a filmed outline. The film is built around the germ of an intriguing idea, and everything follows a fairly logical progression, but none of it happens in a particularly interesting or memorable way.
DiCaprio stars as Danny Archer, a smuggler and hustler who overhears a holding cell confrontation between a rebel soldier and Solomon (the reliably soulful and effective Djimon Hounsou), a diamond field worker who has hidden a huge, uncut stone in the jungle. Solomon was taken from his family by the rebels and only wants to find them; Archer wants the stone, and figures they can help each other out.
There's also the predictably hot American reporter (Jennifer Connelly), who pops up every once in a while to engage in political arguments with Archer and provide him with an uninteresting pseudo-romantic subplot. There's a lot of talk in Blood Diamond-- about Africa and the diamond trade and working for change and American complicity and so forth, and there are two problems with all of this talk. The first is that these lengthy political discourses are usually followed by a car chase or a shoot-out, and the two mix uneasily. The second is that when people have these conversations, they turn into mouthpieces; nothing is less entertaining (or interesting) than A Film With An Agenda, and when a writer is not clever enough to engage in subtext and instead has every character constantly represent exactly What They Believe, then we're veering into Crash territory.
The structure is less than perfect; the film takes entirely too long to get going (and at 143 minutes, it overstays its welcome considerably), and it arrives at what looks, feels, and should be an ending before going on for at least ten more minutes with an entirely unnecessary epilogue (though said epilogue does give us the required moment where the journalist, seeing a private, personal moment, puts down her camera to keep from exploiting her subjects. Shattering stuffback in the 80s, when we first saw it).
However, Blood Diamond is not altogether unsuccessful. There are some moments of real power (though they are fleeting), and however incongruent the action sequences might be, they are well-staged and shot by director Zwick. Connelly does reasonably well with her poorly developed role (no talented actor should be saddled with her stump speech on what it is to be a journalist), and DiCaprio is refreshingly effective as a scumbag (though his accent is a tad dodgy, and his third act change-of-heart is entirely out of nowhere, even by Hollywood standards).
So, yeah, even what works requires qualifiers. And the film's successes are shattered by the laugh-out-loud moment in the end title cards where the audience is informed that these "conflict diamonds" still make their way, in spite of legislation to the contrary, into America, so (and I'm quoting here) "it is up to the consumer to insist that diamonds are conflict free." By that point, I was expecting MacGruff the crime dog to pop in and encourage us to take a bite out of exploitation.
Blood Diamond is reasonably well-made, and as well-acted as can be expected. It is not bad in any particular way, or in any particularly aggressive way. It is just sort of bland and uninspired, and there are too many fine films in theaters now to kill two and a half hours with this one.